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Harvesting updates

We've been harvesting a number of new collections from across the UC Libraries; student plays from UCSF, Golden Mutual State Insurance Company records and digitized manuscripts from UCLA, and Cooperative Extension records from UCM.

In the meantime, we're also working on harvesting from a number of new data sources/endpoints that include YouTube, Flickr, eMuseum. We'll also be looking into harvesting from Internet Archive

We've made some changes to our harvesting code that's designed to pull metadata/files from Nuxeo, for publication in Calisphere – specifically, to support retrieval of very large A/V files (UCSF has a collection of oral history videos that presented this use case)

If you have any digital collections in YouTube or Flickr (or other systems) that you'd like to expose through Calisphere, please let us know!

Calisphere feature updates

In collaboration with the UCR Library, we are piloting the use of Disqus to support user comments – starting with the Jay Kay Klein collection, which has a highly-engaged user community. When viewing any given object, you have the option to sign up and comment using Disqus. With the UCR Library, we'll be conducting an assessment of Disqus to gauge overhead and considerations with moderating comments, and evaluate its overall functionality – with the objective of determining how to scale this beyond the pilot. (We can support enabling Disqus on any Calisphere collection).

We've added functionality in the Calisphere object display to allow users to rotate images. (Some legacy image files do not have the correct orientation; so this is a handy fallback solution). It's based on OpenSeadragon.

We're working on updating the Calisphere object display to provide an icon (and indicator) for any file format that can't be directly rendered for viewing. For example, UCR and UCI Libraries will be adding objects that include WARC and 3D file formats. We want to support the option for users to download the raw files.

Please feel free to contact us if you're interested in learning more about Disqus and/or the pilot

Nuxeo updates

We've been working with the UC3 Merritt team on making the Nuxeo-to-Merritt deposit process a bit more robust, by implementing md5 checksum verifications

OAC updates

Brian continues to work Still working on upgrading all OAC service pages (and other non-Calisphere service-related pages) to HTTPS. It's a big project. Learn more...

Infrastructure updates

We're also looking at into upgrading our implementation of Docker (we use Docker to deploy key infrastructure such as the harvesting framework and Solr index that underlies Calisphere). We're also going to explore transitioning to investigating the use of SolrCloud, so our indexing system will be a bit more robust – and it'll also streamline publication of new collections.

Last, we've been working on security measures related to Spectre and Meltdown hardware vulnerabilities.